Tag: romance

Since reading my 2nd peer review, a lot has changed in my life in relevance to adulting. I lost my glasses which is -1 adult point, but also found a place to live and move out to, which is +4. I got a minor raise at work for my social media use which is +2, but I haven’t been feeling very creative about it which is maybe a -0.5. A lot of changes are about to happen but one thing that has been supremely constant this whole semester, is that I haven’t had any relationship progress. I went on two dates with this guy I’d been seeing before I went travelling in 2016, and the first date was to check in and see where we were at. The second, was me trying to give him a hint that maybe this wasn’t for us. He’s in India right now and hasn’t texted me since that second date so I’m thinking he got the message.

In the mean time, I’m still where I’ve been since I started this whole thing. Serving at the pub, trying to do school work and blowing through a season of the West Wing every week and a half. And pining over my ex. Sort of.

They say never shit where you eat, but apparently I .love shit, because every relationship I’ve ever had has been with someone I’ve worked with. That’s three relationships, and three jobs. The first time he moved away. The second time he quit before we broke up. Now I’m not so lucky. My ex has worked for the group that owns our pub for five years. He’s got a hundred connections in the industry. I’ve worked here for just over a year and although I am moving up and getting my networking done, he’s a million steps ahead. Chances of him quitting any time soon are not likely. So I see him almost everyday, and it’s fine. We get along swimmingly, which is exactly the problem. The reason we broke up isn’t because we didn’t get along. It’s because we weren’t getting it on. Enough for him, in any case. When it first ended I did my whole play the victim thing, “Oh, how could we break up over such a dumb reason”. But the truth is, I hadn’t been feeling too attracted to him towards the end of it and had considered breaking up at times as well. But we were so in sync that I didn’t really want to try.

We’ve hooked up a handful of times since that initial breakup and now it’s been almost 7 months since our last one, but I still stay over at his house from time to time just to crash if I’m working late so I don’t have to take a $60 cab over the Alex Fraser back to where I live. In a month this won’t be an issue anymore because I’ll have moved closer to work than where even he lives, so no more “oh I missed the last train, mind if I crash?” excuses for me. I’m not in love with him. But I feel a lot of affection towards him still and I like being around him. When you work with someone like that, who you think also feels the same way but isn’t going to do anything about it, how are you supposed to move on? There are days when I think about quitting but for the most part I like my job and it’s perk and the $250 tip nights. Recently we had lunch and he talked to me about maybe moving to Toronto to work at the group’s expansion of pubs out there. I told him I didn’t think he should do it for a number of reasons, his schooling, his family, and how he’s told me numerous times he doesn’t want to work in the industry forever. But if he did move, wouldn’t it be easier? Of course I would miss him, but if he left then I wouldn’t have to see him all the time. I wouldn’t feel like I’m constantly torn between wanting to be with him and wanting to laugh this whole thing off. We only dated for six months, and they were great, but six months in is pretty early to not want to be having sex with your partner anymore. Isn’t it?

Regardless, it’s an issue I’m dealing with. Sometimes I tell myself I don’t care but the reality is that I get jealous so easily I can barely function and I need/want his attention all the time. Which I feel like is the equivalent of -100 adult points. So what I’m changing about my blog, for this process post, is it’s image. This isn’t a dating blog. It’s a personal blog. Despite my insistence that that personal blogs are crazy boring, I’ve already turned this into one and so by changing the design, the feel, and a little bit of my life anyway, I’ll steer it towards what it’s been all along. A blog about not-romancing. A blog about me.

I’ve had this countdown on the front page of my blog for the past few weeks, counting down to Valentine’s Day, or as I sometimes call it, “Single’s awareness day”. Despite some bitterness over this title, I usually really enjoy valentine’s day. I like dressing up for it, looking cute, knowing that today more than others people are thinking about their significant other and maybe doing something special for them. This Valentine’s day however, was my first one in three years without a valentine.

I can remember my last three valentine’s exactly. Last year I was on Mt. Washington in Nanaimo with my then boyfriend, Elliott. He bought me snowboarding lessons for Valentine’s day and we had an overall pretty great time hanging out with him and his friends.

The year before I had just started seeing Nate, a guy I had classes with at Langara, and we were at my place hanging out and also doing edibles for the first time. Hella romantic.

The year prior was my first ever year with a Valentine- I was at my first boyfriend Keenan’s house and he made us dinner and then chocolate fondue. Super cheesy, and a very new type of Valentine’s day for me. Some shit went down that night that almost ended our relationship, but we worked it out and were together for almost a year, my longest relationship to date.

All three of my past relationships have started roughly around the same time. New year, new person to date. This year being the exception, I was a little mopey over the fact, although not as much as I would normally be considering I have a lot more going on right now in my life and it’s working as a pretty good distraction for the time being. Never the less, I made an angsty post on my Tumblr account.

Super mature.

I ended up making plans for the day with one of my best friends, Desiree. We hadn’t hung out in a little while and she didn’t have plans. So I headed over there around 4pm. She lives a few minutes away from Commercial Drive, one of my favourite neighbourhoods, and I listened to music as I turned right at the JJ Bean and headed up the hill to her house. On the front porch I knocked on the door as well as texted her, since she shares the house with several other people. Peering through the window, I saw something on the floor. The following ensued:

She had made me dinner and essentially covered the whole place in rose petals. Never in my life have I been so seduced, and here it is, plain as day, by my best friend. We ended up doing facemasks and watching this terrible 90s romcom called “The Wedding Date” which is a movie about a woman who hires a male escort to come with her to her sister’s wedding to make her ex-fiancee jealous. 10% on rotten tomatoes, but it was worth every second to me.

Desiree had seen my Tumblr post and decided to make the day go above and beyond for me. Just another example of how friends are the best thing in the world, and sometimes guys aren’t worth shit if you’ve got someone who will cook you steak and buy you piles of Nutella-To-Go for you to snack on. I love my friends and it definitely makes this whole “not in a relationship” thing worth it sometimes.

I’ve been putting a lot of pressure on myself to use Tinder lately for the following reasons:

It’ll make this blog more entertaining. We’ve all seen “Tinder Nightmares”(they even got a book deal) and know how hilarious (and misogynistic), Tinder can be, and I’ve always felt that screen caps from Tinder would give the blog an easier-to-relate-to, easier-to-read format.

It’s probably the best outlet I have for meeting new people right now.

This super cute guy that I work with met his girlfriend on Tinder and now I, myself, am giving it some credit because if this girl can score a brilliant babe like (censored) on it then possibly, COULD I??

Now the reasons why I haven’t been doing so hot with the ol’ Tinder (excluding reasons mentioned in my latest post Swipe-xiety):

I get this icky feeling inside talking to guys over the internet. It’s possible this is a psychological thing. I am not an overtly feminine person, but I have very few male friends. I have one male friend. I can’t help it, I just don’t talk to a lot of men on the daily! It’s not that I don’t trust men, it’s just that I feel so much more comfortable around women in my daily life. My thought process usually is as follows:

Me: *Sees an ordinary girl on the skytrain*: Look at her. She’s got such a cute outfit on! Where did she buy that jacket? I wonder what she’s listening to? She seems super cool and put together! I hope she has a really nice day!

*Sees an ordinary guy on the skytrain*: …………………..Nikes………………….Oh that girl over there has a really cute outfit!

Even I don’t know what’s going on inside my head. I struggle to get myself to approach these guy because I’m still working on my confident and because of the NightmareSkytrainMan2015, which is a story that deserves a post all on it’s own. Regardless, the skytrain: not always the best place to meet people.

Not to sound completely horrible here but I think the reason I’ve struggled so much with having guy friends is that if I meet a guy I get along with enough I usually fall in love with him and ruin everything. I’m just more open around girls. I trust girls. A girl isn’t gonna date and make out with me for four months and then insist we’re just friends. She’s not gonna refuse to talk to me about what’s bothering her because she’s never learned to to talk about her emotions. She’s not gonna leave the toilet seat up.

I love my girlfriends- I relate to them, and they support me. Female friendships get a bad rep for being “dramatic” in a stereotypical sense, but the drama I’ve had with my girlfriends has luckily been kept to a minimum. My one guy friend, Lucas, is only the exception to this rule because despite being interesting, well travelled and conventionally attractive he is also sort of a horrible person and while I fully enjoy having him as a friend I could never date him knowing how he’s dealt with certain relationships in the past. So that’s a slight cheat to the problem.

I just feel way more comfortable dating people I’ve already met IRL. That way I already have my intuition to guide me on deciding whether or not this person is actually funny and interesting or if they just want to lure me back to their crusty basement apartment and get stoned. All of this ads up to a lot of mostly-unwarranted anxiety about using Tinder at all which leads me to reason number two of why I haven’t been doin’ so hot on the ol’ Tinder:

2. It makes me nervous and I’m lazy.

Another aspect of not knowing these guys in person is that I don’t feel all that inclined to talk to them. If I knew them in person not only would it put me under more pressure to reply to messages (I might run into them on the street! They could tell supposed mutual friends I’m ignoring them!), but it would also make me want to more.

The lesson I learned this past week is that just because you make a blog post saying you’re going to start doing something, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to start doing it. For example, I was talking to my friend Alex the other day about how she lost all this weight by cutting gluten and dairy out of her diet (hellooooo Vancouver) and I said, “Y’know what? I’m gonna do that! I could lose some weight!” Cut to me waking up the next day and remembering how expensive and disgusting gluten-free bread is and how much I love cream cheese. Crisis averted. Next!

What I mean is that you shouldn’t force yourself to do something you don’t want to do, because it’ll make you miserable. You’ll get nervous and dread doing things you should look forward to, and find yourself crying over dairy free cream cheese. I want this blog to be about my dating life but to be completely honest my dating life is pretty mellow right now. I’m back in school and I’m still working full time, not to mention commuting almost three hours a day plus planning on moving out, plus I just started a new sport. Dating and welcoming new people into my life might be hard to squeeze in.

So I’ve decided to give myself a break on the Tinder regime. I’ll go back on again from time to time but it’s not going to be the only format on this blog. You might be reading some more personal stuff, stories about past dates and relationships as well as hopefully future ones. It’s already making me more eager to post more than once a week. And who knows, hopefully I’ll find a few matches in the real world as well as the online one for once as well.

Swipe-xiety is one of the reasons I could never commit to Tinder in the first place. It would always be there, nestled close to my heart every time I even considered swiping right. It’s the feeling that I owe something to the person I’m matching with.

I’m aware that this is a perfectly fixable problem. I don’t owe this person anything! I’ve never even spoken to them before! How can they expect anything of me? All these feelings mixed with the fact that I have a crippling need to not let anyone down ever. And by doing what I often (or used to often) do on Tinder, ignore everyone, I feel like I’m doing just that.

I imagine them at home, miserable, in a basement apartment surrounded by textbooks and empty cans of Dr. Pepper. Suddenly- my face! A bright light in the darkness of their 20-something lonely, gym sock scented despair. They swipe right… it’s a match!! They’re elated! Finally, a girl cute and committed enough to launch them into enough motivation to quit their jobs at Chipotle and get back on the market goal wise! They send an eager first text, perfectly summarizing all their hopes and dreams for our relationship together:

“Hey”

They wait. A few minutes pass. They go to the washroom. They check their phone again. Still no response. A shiver of doubt crawls up their bony, malnourished spines. They unwrap a dinner of hot pockets and while it’s in the microwave they check again. Still nothing. They spend three hours playing counterstrike online and spend $40 real-life dollars on a skin for their completely fake combat gear. Another check. Still nothing.

Slowly, realization dawns on them that a girl like me, glowing, golden goddess that I am, could never go for a pale, go-to-the-gym-once-every-two-weeks, hot pocket filled, Douglas Kinesiology student like themselves. They’re devastated. They spend the next two days without sleep, watching video game walkthroughs on Youtube and living off Dominos. I’ve failed these men. I’ve let them return to the crippling, vitamin D deprived lives they’ve been leading. This is what I’m afraid of.

In reality I’m pretty sure all guys swipe right to every girl on Tinder to increase their matches and couldn’t pick me out of a lineup of Vancouver Film Girls if there was a neon sign over my head that said “DREAM GIRL”.

But you get my point.

So while swiping most recently I’ve been fighting it. My swipe-xiety. I’m pushing it down, down, away from my heart in to my stomach where it’ll burn up by all the acid and gunk down there. I don’t owe these guys anything. I am getting matches. I don’t have to talk to them or meet them IRL if I don’t want to. I am a stone cold bitch. I am a contender. I am not going out with anyone who eats hot pockets. I am going to get over this.

About Me

I'm a 21 year old server from Vancouver BC. Born in the city, raised in the suburbs and about to move back to Vancouver on my own for the very first time. This is my attempt at adulthood. Whatever that means.